Lee Sandlin

(1956 - 2014)

A longtime contributor to the Chicago Reader, Lee Sandlin published Wicked River, a history of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century, in 2010, followed three years later by Storm Kings, an account of early American tornado chasers and the development of meteorology. He died in 2014 at the age of fifty-eight. “They’re breezy and ironic and devastating and hilarious,” former Reader editor Alison True wrote of Sandlin’s essays. “They’re education posing as picaresques.”